SleepBot, Sleep Better

"18 million. That’s the number of people, and counting, who are believed to have sleep apnea. What’s most shocking is that three-quarters of them don’t even know that they have the disorder.

Sleep apnea is a chronic disease where the person’s tongue and soft palate fall against the back of the throat, making it difficult to breathe. The disorder can lead to chronic heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, sudden death, among other serious effects for adults."

"Aviisha Medical Institute will offer free sleep apnea screening and assessments for patients between April 18 and April 30. The assessments will be conducted online by Aviisha sleep specialists using Aviisha’s telemedicine platform."

"Researchers have found that depressed and excessively anxious moms may actually be fueling their own exhaustion by waking their babies at night.

To our surprise, we found that moms with elevated depressive symptoms and those with elevated worry were much more likely to seek out their babies in the middle of the night and be with them even when their babies didn’t need attention,” says Teti. “Some babies were sound asleep and their mothers would pick them up and disrupt their sleep.”

"They then investigated whether the mothers' symptoms of depression caused them to behave in ways that affected their infants' sleep, or whether infants' night awakenings led their mothers to be more depressed, perhaps because of lack of sleep.

The researchers found that it's the depression-linked behavior of mothers that interferes with infants' sleep.

Mothers who are feeling depressed may seek emotional comfort by going to their infants during the night, the researchers explained."

"Researchers also found that sleep may impact appetite regulation because being sleep deprived has an effect on ghrelin, the appetite hormone, and leptin, which is what gives us the signal to stop eating because we are satiated.

Sleep deprivation increases the secretion of ghrelin and leptin, which then may increase how much food we consume."

"Researchers have found further experimental evidence that inadequate sleep can increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. A five-week study showed that sleep disruption decreases insulin secretion, increases blood glucose levels and slows metabolism enough to lead to significant weight gain."

"In the 24-hour retest—where all subjects had a full night of sleep—those participants who went to bed shortly after learning the words did much better than those who went through an entire day before sleeping.

.. subjects who slept between tests were significantly better at remembering the unrelated words than those who got no shuteye."